Tibet Crisis

Reports on the violence have underscored that Tibetan merchants competing
with Han and Hui are especially antagonistic to the presence of non-Tibetans
. Alongside monks, Tibetan merchants were the mainstay of protests in Lhasa
in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This time around, many Han and Hui-owned
shops were torched. Many of those involved in arson, looting, and ethnic-
based beatings are also likely to have been unemployed young men. Towns have
experienced much rural-to-urban migration of Tibetans with few skills
needed for urban employment. Videos from Lhasa showed the vast majority of
rioters were males in their teens or twenties.

The recent actions in Tibetan areas differ from the broad-based
demonstrations of “people power” movements in several parts of the world
in the last few decades. They hardly show the overwhelming Tibetan anti-
Chinese consensus portrayed in the international media. The highest media
estimate of Tibetans who participated in protests is 20,000 — by Steve Chao
, the Beijing Bureau Chief of Canadian Television News, i.e. one of every
300 Tibetans. Compare that to the 1986 protests against the Marcos
dictatorship by about three million — one out of every 19 Filipinos.

Tibetans have legitimate grievances about not being sufficiently helped to
compete for jobs and in business with migrants to Tibet. There is also job
discrimination by Han migrants in favor of family members and people from
their native places. The gaps in education and living standards between
Tibetans and Han are substantial and too slow in narrowing. The grievances
have long existed, but protests and rioting took place this year because the
Olympics make it opportune for separatists to advance their agenda. Indeed,
there was a radical disconnect between Tibetan socio-economic grievances
and the slogans raised in the protests, such as “Complete Independence for
Tibet” and “May the exiles and Tibetans inside Tibet be reunited,”
slogans that not coincidentally replicate those raised by pro-independence
Tibetan exiles.

While separatists will not succeed in detaching Tibet from China by rioting,
they believe that China will eventually collapse, like the former Soviet
Union and Yugoslavia, and they seek to establish their claim to rule before
that happens. Alternatively, they think that the United States may intervene
, as it has elsewhere, to foster the breakaway of regions in countries to
which the US is antagonistic, e.g. Kosovo and southern Sudan. The Chinese
government also fears such eventualities, however unlikely they are to come
to pass. It accordingly acts to suppress separatism, an action that comports
with its rights under international law.

Separatists know they can count on the automatic sympathy of Western
politicians and media, who view China as a strategic economic and political
competitor. Western elites have thus widely condemned China for suppressing
riots that these elites would never allow to go unsuppressed in their own
countries. They demand that China be restrained in its response; yet, during
the Los Angeles uprising or riots of 1992 — which spread to a score of
other major cities — President George H.W. Bush stated when he sent in
thousands of soldiers, that “There can be no excuse for the murder, arson,
theft or vandalism that have terrorized the people of Los Angeles . . . Let
me assure you that I will use whatever force is necessary to restore order.
” Neither Western politicians nor mainstream media attacked him on this
score, while neither Western leaders nor the Dalai Lama have criticized
those Tibetans who recently engaged in ethnic-based attacks and arson.

Western elites give the Chinese government no recognition for significant
improvements in the lives of Tibetans as a result of subsidies from the
China’s central government and provinces, improvements that the Dalai Lama
has himself admitted. Western politicians and media also consistently credit
the Dalai Lama’s charge that “cultural genocide” is underway in Tibet,
even though the exiles and their supporters offer no credible evidence of
the evisceration of Tibetan language use, religious practice or art. In fact
, more than 90% of Tibetans speak Tibetan as their mother tongue. Tibet has
about 150,000 monks and nuns, the highest concentration of full-time “
clergy” in the Buddhist world. Western scholars of Tibetan literature and
art forms have attested that it is flourishing.

Ethnic contradictions in Tibet arise from the demography, economy and
politics of the Tibetan areas. Separatists and their supporters claim that
Han Chinese have been “flooding” into Tibet, “swamping” Tibetans
demographically. In fact, between the national censuses of 1990 and 2000 (
which count everyone who has lived in an area for six months or more), the
percentage of Tibetans in the Tibetan areas as a whole increased somewhat
and Han were about one-fifth of the population. A preliminary analysis of
the 2005 mini-census shows that from 2000-2005 there was a small increase in
the proportion of Han in the central-western parts of Tibet (the Tibet
Autonomous Region or TAR) and little change in eastern Tibet. Pro-
independence forces want the Tibetan areas cleansed of Han (as happened in
1912 and 1949); the Dalai Lama has said he will accept a three-to-one
Tibetan to non-Tibet population ratio, but he consistently misrepresents the
present situation as one of a Han majority. Given his status as not merely
the top Tibetan Buddhist religious leader, but as an emanation of Buddha,
most Tibetans credit whatever he says on this or other topics.

The Tibetan countryside, where three-fourths of the population lives, has
very few non-Tibetans. The vast majority of Han migrants to Tibetan towns
are poor or near-poor. They are not personally subsidized by the state;
although like urban Tibetans, they are indirectly subsidized by
infrastructure development that favors the towns. Some 85% of Han who
migrate to Tibet to establish businesses fail; they generally leave within
two to three years. Those who survive economically offer competition to
local Tibetan business people, but a comprehensive study in Lhasa has shown
that non-Tibetans have pioneered small and medium enterprise sectors that
some Tibetans have later entered and made use of their local knowledge to
prosper.

Tibetans are not simply an underclass; there is a substantial Tibetan middle
class, based in government service, tourism, commerce, and small-scale
manufacturing/ transportation. There are also many unemployed or under-
employed Tibetans, but almost no unemployed or underemployed Han because
those who cannot find work leave. Many Han migrants have racist attitudes
toward Tibetans, mostly notions that Tibetans are lazy, dirty, and obsessed
with religion. Many Tibetans reciprocate with representations of Han as rich
, money-obsessed and conspiring to exploit Tibetans. Long-resident urban
Tibetans absorb aspects of Han culture in much the same way that ethnic
minorities do with ethnic majority cultures the world over. Tibetans are not
however being forcibly “Sincized.” Most Tibetans speak little or no
Chinese. They begin to learn it in the higher primary grades and, in many
Tibetan areas, must study in it if they go on to secondary education.
Chinese, however, is one of the two most important languages in the world
and considerable advantages accrue to those who learn it, just as they do to
non-native English speakers.

The Tibetan exiles argue that religious practice is sharply restricted in
Tibetan areas. The Chinese government has the right under international law
to regulate religious institutions to prevent them from being used as
vehicles for separatism and the control of religion is in fact mostly a
function of the state’s (overly-developed) concern about separatism and
secondarily about how the hyper-development of religious institutions
counteracts “development” among ethnic Tibetans. Certain state policies do
infringe on freedom of religion; for example, the forbidding, in the TAR (
Tibet Autonomous Region), of state employees and university students to
participate in religious rites. The lesser degree of control over religion
in the eastern Tibetan areas beyond the TAR– at least before the events of
March, 2008 — indicate however that the Chinese government calibrates its
control according to the perceived degree of separatist sentiment in the
monasteries.

The Dalai Lama’s regime was of course itself a theocracy that closely
regulated the monasteries, including the politics, hierarchy and number of
monks. The exile authorities today circumscribe by fiat those religious
practices they oppose, such as the propitiation of a “deity” known as
Dorje Shugden. The cult of the Dalai Lama, which is even stronger among
monks than it is among Hollywood stars, nevertheless mandates acceptance of
his claim that restrictions on religious management and practice in Tibet
arise solely from the Chinese state’s supposed anti-religious animus.
Similarly, the cult requires the conviction that the Dalai Lama is a
pacifist, even though he has explicitly or implicitly endorsed all wars
waged by the US.

The Dalai Lama is a Tibetan ethnic nationalist whose worldview is — in US
terms — both liberal and conservative. He and many of his foreign
supporters have a pronounced affinity for conservative politicians, such as
Bush, Thatcher, Lee Teng-hui and Ishihara Shintaro, but they can get along
well with liberals like US Speaker Nancy Pelosi, because they are virulently
anti-communist and anti-China.

The Dalai Lama is far from being a supporter of oppressed peoples. For
example, in 2002, when he visited Australia, the Dalai Lama, upon arriving
in Melbourne, noted “he had flown over ‘a large empty area’ of Australia
that could house millions of people from other densely populated continents.
” The area is, of course, not wholly empty, as it contains Aborigines. To
them, the Dalai Lama proffered the advice that “black people ‘should
appreciate what white people have brought to this country, its development.
’” (R. Callick, “Dalai Lama Treads Fine Line,” Australian Financial
Review, May 22, 2002).

The development of the “market economy” has had much the same effect in
Tibetan areas as in the rest of China, i.e. increased exploitation,
exacerbated income and wealth differentials, and rampant corruption. The
degree to which this involves an “ethnic division of labor” that
disadvantages Tibetans is however exaggerated by separatists in order to
foster ethnic antagonism. For example, Tibet is not the poorest area of
China, as is often claimed. It is better off than several other ethnic
minority areas and even than some Han areas, in large measure due to heavy
government subsidies. Rural Tibetans as well receive more state subsidies
than other minorities. The exile leaders employ hyperbole not only in terms
of the degree of empirical difference, but also concerning the more
fundamental ethnic relationship in Tibet: in contrast to, say, Israel/
Palestine, Tibetans have the same rights as Han, they enjoy certain
preferential economic and social policies, and about half the top party
leaders in the TAR have been ethnic Tibetans.

Tibet has none of the indicia of a colony or occupied territory and thus has
no relationship to self-determination, a concept that in recent decades has
often been misused, especially by the US, to foster the breakup of states
and consequent emiseration of their populations. A settlement between the
Chinese government and Tibetan exile elites is a pre-condition for the
mitigation of Tibetan grievances because absent a settlement, ethnic
politics will continue to subsume every issue in Tibet, as it does for
example, in Taiwan and Kosovo, where ethnic binaries are constructed by “
ethnic political entrepreneurs,” who seek to outbid each other for support.

The protests in Tibet had no progressive aspect. Many who participated in
the ethnic murders, beatings and arsons in Lhasa were poor rural migrants to
the city, but the slogans there and elsewhere in Tibet almost all concerned
independence or the Dalai Lama. There have been many movements the world
over in which marginalized people have taken a reactionary and often racist
road, for example, al-Qaeda or much of the base of the Nazis. The riots in
Tibet also have done nothing to advance discussions of a political
settlement between the Chinese government and exiles, yet a settlement is
necessary for the substantial mitigation of Tibetan grievances. For Tibetan
pro-independence forces, a setback to such efforts may have been their very
purpose in fostering the riots. Tibetan pro-independence forces, like
separatists everywhere, seek to counter any view of the world that is not
ethnic-based and to thwart all efforts to resolve ethnic contradictions, in
order to boost the mobilization needed to sustain their ethnic nationalist
projects. They have claimed that China will soon collapse and the US will
thereafter increase its patronage of a Tibetan state elite, to the benefit
of ordinary Tibetans. One only has to look round the world at the many
humanitarian catastrophes that have resulted from such thinking to project
what consequences are likely to follow for ordinary Tibetans if the
separatist fantasy were fulfilled.

http://www.blackandwhitecat.org/2008/04/01/separatism-and-tibet/